One literally can’t turn away for two seconds without weird things happening. While I’m on maternity leave, my colleagues decided to request a new position in Spanish. It sounds like a great thing until you find out that the position is in. . . completely dead and irrelevant Chicano Studies. Maybe one could somehow justify a specialist in Chicano Studies somewhere at a huge school in California that has every other specialist possible and is trying to sound hip in a very 1980s kind of way. But in Southern Illinois, it’s pretty much the most irrelevant thing on the planet. If there are still people who are not academics and who identify as Chicanos, they are not located in this region, that’s for sure.
It’s always a bad sign when schools abandon the meaningful traditional model of Medieval / Golden Age / Enlightenment / Colonial / XIXth century / XXth century / poetry / drama, etc model and engage in manufacturing weird fields that will fall out of fashion 15 minutes from now. The most bizarre example of this was a professorial position in Disability Studies offered by a Department of Spanish of a certain huge university. The professor in question concentrated on studying depictions of disability in literature. The department has been going to the dogs ever since.
I’m afraid that by the time I emerge from my maternity leave, we will have not only Chicano Studies but also the expired Comparative Literature track at my department. It’s like we are in the business of picking up everything the world has joyfully discarded. Or we could go completely Californian and offer a course on how Spanglish is a real language and it’s perfectly OK to say “diecitres” instead of “trece” because requiring that anybody speak Spanish correctly is imperialist and oppressive.
Clarissa's Blog 
Ja, ja, mira tu email y te explico…
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el de trabajo?
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Or, as I heard a Hispanic woman end her conversation conducted in Spanish:
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Si
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AMEN.
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I knew you’d like it. 🙂
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“..the expired Comparative Literature”
Could you expand on this? My school has a big program in comp lit, and I know several grad students in this field.
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Your school may have a big program in comp lit but the job market for comp. lit jobs is particularly bleak. I think that perhaps there are maybe 1 or 2 comp lit jobs a year nationally?
Additionally, the field tends to be a bit old fashioned. Comp lit folks tend to engage in the sort of lit crit that was popular at the midcentury. I think there is something to be said for comp lit. But the field isn’t thriving. If it were up to me, I’d advise grad students to specialize in the literature of one country.
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“Your school may have a big program in comp lit but the job market for comp. lit jobs is particularly bleak. ”
“But the field isn’t thriving. If it were up to me, I’d advise grad students to specialize in the literature of one country.”
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This is very interesting to me because in the UK where I am based comp lit is coming back in a big way. A number of highly-respected universities have reinstated their comp lit programmes, and MA degrees in particular are proliferating. More importantly, there seems to be a steady stream of jobs in the field as well. Of course, this is not the old fashioned comp lit of the past but what seems to be a much more globally-minded and innovative version. This is after many, many years in which comp lit was effectively dead over here, so I suppose it goes to show that these things are cyclical to an extent. Meanwhile, Modern Languages are on the decline, and I suspect that comp lit is to a degree a replacement.
We have some less orthodox specialist positions in my department but in our case, we are a huge department with every possible traditional area covered many times over, and the more niche positions were developed because of their importance to our geographical location and history.
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Comp lit appears to be on the way out at my university. Admissions to the graduate programs have stopped, and from what I hear they have almost no undergraduate majors. Things look OK in the course catalog, but if you start clicking on courses it quickly becomes clear that all of the courses are really just cross listed from English, foreign languages, and classics. The handful of actual comp lit courses have tiny enrollments and they frequently get canceled. I can’t imagine how the program survives the next time an administrator seeks to make him/herself look good with a round of program eliminations.
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